Looking for a different way to make puppet shows, Blair Thomas went to hear Argentinean puppet master Javier Villafane speak in New York last year. Villafane, now in his 90s, said he had been inspired by Federico Garcia Lorca to become a puppeteer: Villafane took a wagon full of marionettes and hand puppets into the Argentinean countryside and gave shows from it for much of his life. He met Garcia Lorca in Buenos Aires in 1937 or 1938, at a time when the playwright had become disillusioned with conventional theater and was dabbling in puppetry himself: he wrote several marionette plays about a brute named Don Cristobal who seduces the landlord’s daughter and makes a fool of a well-born doctor.
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Anyone who’s watched the modern-day equivalent of puppet shows–Saturday morning cartoons–might have to agree with Villafane. Cartoon characters relentlessly chase each other, get hit on the head with clubs, frying pans, and boulders, and flatten themselves on the ground after thousand-foot falls from cliffs but jump up moments later to continue their pursuit. These apparently immortal characters are consumed by an anarchic lust for the objects they desire. Their lust, and its continual frustration, is what makes cartoons so funny.
Before hearing Villafane speak, Thomas had followed the example of the Bread and Puppet Theatre, a New York collective inspired by the social-activist theories of Herbert Marcuse. They create huge pageants, perform them for free, and distribute free bread at performances. Thomas and his collaborators in Red Moon Theatre at one time made similar gigantic papier-mache puppets. In fact their studio–a storefront in West Town–is jammed to the ceiling with huge hands and heads and diminutive papier-mache marionettes; stuck in a corner near the ceiling is a 12-foot-high ear, easily large enough for a person to curl up in. Red Moon used these puppets to stage pageants with large casts. A few years ago they performed a version of Moby Dick on North Avenue beach with huge puppets hung from long poles carried by the cast; they charged no admission. But eventually the effort these pageants required wore Thomas down, and he looked for a way to make puppet shows with fewer people.
